NHS funding of homeopathy

[Asolepius]

They just do not get it. The point is that anyone making a claim has the obligation to provide supporting evidence. It is not about absolute truths. There are none of those in science, only degrees of uncertainty. Orthodox medicine is (mostly) supported by evidence which provides some degree of confidence. Our criticism of CAM is that it does not provide that confidence. So I am fearful of the unknown? Don't make me laugh. The unknown is what drives science.

 

[Blue Wode]

Exasperation (Anne Baring)

I would like to express my exasperation with the professor at Exeter University who keeps rubbishing homeopathy and other alternative approaches to the treatment of illness and disease. Every so often the "establishment" (in this case the medical one) has a fit of demonising what it would like to see eliminated, rather like Hitler demonising the Jews. The media rushes off to find a scientific "expert" who will confirm its suspicions that "there is nothing in homeopathy". There is a tendency in the human psyche to demonise or ridicule anything that threatens the "safe" orthodox view and that cannot be "rationally" explained, which boils down to a fear of the unknown.

http://www.hmc21.org/phdi/p1.nsf/supppages/2555?opendocument&part=7#exasperate

With regard to MS Baring’s comments about “the professor at Exeter University who keeps rubbishing homeopathy and other alternative approaches to the treatment of illness and disease” she is obviously unaware of Professor Edzard Ernst’s background:

It is hard to imagine a member of the UK's medical elite devoting their life to complementary medicine. Ernst, however, comes from a culture where alternative therapies have long blended with the mainstream. He is from four generations of conventional doctors but, he says, "Even as a young boy I was treated with complementary therapies - mostly homeopathy."

His first post was in a homeopathic hospital in Munich, where he was greatly impressed. "If you study medicine and pharmacology, you know [homeopathy] can't work," he says. The active substances in homeopathic medicines are so diluted that pharmacology says they cannot have an effect. "Then you start working in a homeopathic hospital and people get better. Is that a miracle? It certainly is very impressive for a young doctor.

"Looking back, I wonder if a lot was a placebo effect."

http://education.guardian.co.uk/academicexperts/story/0,1392,1048903,00.html

And with regard to the Hitler comparison, it would appear that Ms Baring has not done her homework there either. In the past, Edzard Ernst has written at length about the German and Austrian medical professions under the Nazis and has a full understanding of the whole situation:

...he [Ernst] decided to look into the history of the Vienna medical school for a special occasion. He found the official records stopped in 1938. He was told he had better not delve further, but in a paper that he describes as among the most important he has ever published, in the Annals of Internal Medicine of May 1995, Ernst exposed the terrible truth of what took place during the Nazi years in the name of medicine in Vienna.

[See here: http://www.annals.org/cgi/content/full/122/10/789 ]

Jewish doctors who dominated the profession there were sacked - 153 of the 197 faculty members - and the dean was replaced by the Nazi professor Eduard Pernkopf. Appalling atrocities took place. Many children were killed at the paediatric hospital. Pernkopf worked on an anatomical atlas, which is still in use, drawn from the bodies of those children, and his institute of anatomy used the corpses of the executed for teaching. Viennese professors led experiments on prisoners at Dachau. After the war the Jewish doctors who had been sacked but survived were not invited back, and the Nazi physicians stayed on, mostly escaping retribution.

In a letter in a later edition of the journal, Ernst wrote: "It is important to realise that, by and large, the German and Austrian medical professions were not victimised by the Nazis but actively guided the developments leading to the monstrous disasters and unspeakable violations of ethical behaviour."

His family was not Jewish and his father had a clean record in the war, but Ernst finds it hard to deal with the legacy of medicine under the Nazis. He has no wish to return to Germany and he has taken British nationality, "because it became clear to me that this is where I will spend my days. It is just an honest way of approaching it".

http://education.guardian.co.uk/academicexperts/story/0,1392,1048903,00.html

Getting back to the homeopathy campaign, it's interesting to note that the declaration has so far attracted 2,870 signatures, nationally and internationally…
http://www.hmc21.org/

So just 247,130 to go before June 2008.

 

[Blue Wode]

‘The Evidence For Homeopathy’

The homeopathy project team for the NHS National Library of Health has just been put under the microscope over at apgaylard's blog:

...So, what is the clinical evidence for homeopathy? How strong is the evidence base?

Peter Fisher is [also] the clinical lead for The NHS’ National Library for Health “Complementary and Alternative Medicine Specialist Library”. Who else is involved in this project? The website provides the following information:

“… The Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) Specialist Library is being developed by a Project Team drawn from the following three organisations: the Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital, the Research Council for Complementary Medicine, and the School of Integrated Health at the University of Westminster.”​

It also provides and states the aim of the project:

“The overall aim is to make good quality, relevant information on complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) available to health professionals and patients. The specific objectives are to identify relevant information on a regular basis, use appropriate evaluation tools or procedures to assess the quality of this information and to organise information that is of adequate quality in such a way that it is readily accessible.”​

Given the involvement of the leading lights of UK academic and tax-payer funded homeopathy, this database should be as good as it gets. So, I thought that I’d review it and see what the homeopathic community consider their best evidence to be.

Read on…
http://apgaylard.wordpress.com/2007/11/19/the-evidence-for-homeopathy/

 

[rjh01]

Interesting blog entry. When we are asked is 2007 a good year for skeptics that would be one piece of evidence that says the answer is yes.

 

[Deetee]

Good summary of the database.
I particularly liked the study where the outcome measured was "Time to first flatus"

(A study on post operative bowel ileus, if you must know)

 

[Asolepius]

The homeopathy project team for the NHS National Library of Health has just been put under the microscope over at apgaylard's blog:

This really is worthy of publication in a journal. Wonderful stuff.

 

[volatile]

This was in the Guarian yesterday. Tom Whipple emailed every single one of these MPs and has collated a list of those who replied (at statsdontlie.wordpress.com) and produced a brief piece of reportage:

The replies varied from pragmatic to puzzling, but few contained evidence.
Lembit Opik argued - in an admirably bold deviation from accepted medical practice - that taxpayers should pay for treatments until they are shown to fail, rather than the other way around. "The onus is less on homeopathy to prove itself than on its detractors to prove it necessarily does not work," he said.
Harry Cohen joined him at the more eccentric end of the spectrum by implying that conventional medical treatments were improperly tested (he would not say which ones) and referring to Prince Charles as someone "who has made a very strong case" for homeopathy.
Some emails bounced and fewer than half the MPs replied. However, many responses were perfectly reasonable. John Hemming spoke for many when he said: "Even if you take the perspective that it only acts like a psychological treatment, then it is effective."

One response that jumps out at me is this one:

BRIAN JENKINS

Dear Tom,

Thank you for approaching me as one of the Members of Parliament who signed in support of Early Day Motion 1240 titled ‘NHS Homeopathic Hospitals.’

When I look to sign EDM’s I always approach them with an open mind and base the decision on which to sign them on common sense. Regardless of whom the sponsor is my, conclusion to either support it or not is based solely on the merits evident.

In the case of this EDM I was able to rely on the excellent research done on behalf of the British Homeopathic Association and Faculty of Homeopathy.

Bolding mine. Could our elective representatives' grip on reality be any more tenuous? If this is how they approach such a manifestly absurd EDM, how do they approach the more nuanced and complex issues they are required to vote on every single day?


"Sir.


There is no evidence that spousal abuse harms spouses. I am confident that the excellent research of the British Association of Wife Beaters, which unequivocally proves this, is sufficient to render any further discussion moot"

 

[Asolepius]

This was in the Guarian yesterday. Tom Whipple emailed every single one of these MPs and has collated a list of those who replied (at statsdontlie.wordpress.com) and produced a brief piece of reportage..........

If politicians have such a poor understanding of what evidence is, no wonder they do such stupid things. There was not one single response here that I haven't heard before numerous times, or made any sense either.

 

[Deetee]

A startlingly frank response from this MP (why on earth do we pay them so much money?)
I haven't heard this excuse before, I must admit - have you Asolepius?

JOHN HEMMING

"A good question, one that it is right to answer and one which I don’t have a proper answer to. In part that is because in common with other MPs I don’t spend a lot of time researching EDMs before signing them."

 

[Rolfe]

This really is worthy of publication in a journal. Wonderful stuff.

Oh, I missed that yesterday.

Gaaaahhhhhh!! It's the same every time. I looked at the (very few) studies reviewed in this old page from the Faculty of Homoeopathy web site (I link to a mirror as it's not there now), and found nothing of any substance at all. One of the studies they listed, if I remember correctly, was actually negative. The studies they refer to are described in a biassed way and include at least one blatant lie about what is actually in the paper - and there are no links to the original articles or even abstracts to allow the reader to check the facts. As with the list examined by apgaylard, some well-known negative articles, of impeccable pedigree, are simply ignored (note that the date on the page is 2004, so it's not that old).

At the time, my view was, if that's the best that the actual medical homoeopaths can do, then why are they bothering? Seems as if little has changed.

However, they are a problem. What they are doing is very clever. Just create what looks like an impressive and worthy list of real research, and they scarcely even have to list studies that are positive. Simply listing the titles of papers in journals is enough for lazy, biassed or simply stupid people like Brian Jenkins to be happy that there is a body of "excellent rsearch" they can refer to, end of argument.

Any ideas on how to counter this, welcome. The problem with everything that has been done is twofold. First, it requires a degree of commitment to finding out the facts, and indeed openmindedness, even to start to read it. Politicians and bureaucrats don't want to do that, it taxes their brains and their preconceptions. Second, it's often criticised as being negative, and even rude or impolite (in that it contradicts people who should be respected). "That's a slur!"



Rolfe.

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

Perhaps you should focus on one disease at a time? Pick something that the practitioners of homeopathy claim to treat effectively and show that it doesn't work. There might be less resistance if you are not seen to be discrediting the whole of homeopathy at once.

 

[Mojo]

Perhaps you should focus on one disease at a time? Pick something that the practitioners of homeopathy claim to treat effectively and show that it doesn't work.

Homoeopaths will claim that they "treat the patient", not any named disease, so they will have an "out" there. Many of them don't even accept that specific diseases exist: each condition is unique to the patient suffering from it.

 

[tkingdoll]

I know John Hemming, ish, he used to be my MP. He's a decent enough sort but his comments about not researching what he signs...well, if I were the recipient of that email I'd go to the press.

 

[Asolepius]

A startlingly frank response from this MP (why on earth do we pay them so much money?)
I haven't heard this excuse before, I must admit - have you Asolepius?

Well I didn't really count that as any kind of answer. It was so pathetic that it slipped under my radar. Frankly one is put off voting for any of this useless lot. My own MP Robert Key signed, but didn't respond to this chap. I did get a response though - he just said "We will have to agree to disagree". It is an indictment of our educational system that people to whom we might be expected to look up, mostly claiming to have good educations, can be so pig ignorant on such a vital subject. I don't mean on homeopathy, I mean on what evidence is.

 

[Ivor the Engineer]

Homoeopaths will claim that they "treat the patient", not any named disease, so they will have an "out" there. Many of them don't even accept that specific diseases exist: each condition is unique to the patient suffering from it.

Slippery bunch, aren't they?

Perhaps that's why politicians appear to have such an affinity for them?

 

[Rolfe]

Quite a number of studies showing no effect of homoeopathy have focussed, not so much on a single condition, but on a single remedy. However, to make the protocol easier, there's usually a single condition as well - such as the arnica study that used patients who'd all had carpal tunnel surgery. At the end, it is SOP to say, we find no evidence that homoeopathy is useful for [whatever], but this conclusion has no bearing on the possible effectiveness of other remedies for other conditions. The homoeopaths just love these caveats.

And yes, if all else fails, then of course they don't treat the illness, they treat the patient. And no matter how many fully-paid-up homoeopaths you got to sign the original protocol or even design the bloody protocol, when the negative result appears it is suddenly discovered by every other homoeopath in existence that the protocol was wrong, this was not real homoeopathy, and in fact it was probably deliberately designed to fail to smear homoeopathy. And the ones who endorsed it beforehand will say not a word.

This isn't about more and more studies, it's about getting over to the unconcerned and the arse-lickers that homoeopathic propaganda is a pack of lies, and that's a hard thing to do without making yourself look like the bad guy.

Rolfe.

 

[Mojo]

Quite a number of studies showing no effect of homoeopathy have focussed, not so much on a single condition, but on a single remedy. However, to make the protocol easier, there's usually a single condition as well - such as the arnica study that used patients who'd all had carpal tunnel surgery. At the end, it is SOP to say, we find no evidence that homoeopathy is useful for [whatever], but this conclusion has no bearing on the possible effectiveness of other remedies for other conditions. The homoeopaths just love these caveats.

The usual objection to these trials is, of course, that it's not a proper test of homoeopathy because of the lack of individualisation. I'm just wondering, though, how much individualisation there really is. In particular with things like arnica for bruising (or other remedies used in "first aid" situations): what proportion of patients with bruising are treated with arnica? And for what proportion of these do they claim the spectacular results we see in the anecdotes?

Are remedies really always individualised, or do all patients who say they are suffering from a particular condition (or who exhibit symptoms of a particular condition) tend to get the same remedy. And what proportion of patients would they claim good results for after the first remedy prescribed - again, if the anecdotal accounts we see are representative of the actual rersults, this should be a fairly high proportion.

Has any research been carried out on what remedies are actually prescribed for particular conditions?

And yes, if all else fails, then of course they don't treat the illness, they treat the patient.

Without considering underlying causes, of course - just the symptoms.

"Holistic" my eye.

 

[Phytotherapist]

Homoeopathy may be very usefull in weaning off people from unneccessary and dangerous drugs that cause iatrogenic diseases and iatrogenic neuroses.

 

[Chris Haynes]

Homoeopathy may be very usefull in weaning off people from unneccessary and dangerous drugs that cause iatrogenic diseases and iatrogenic neuroses.

Like Baby Gloria's eczema?


Or the those meds to prevent malaria?

Or the nasty meds for HIV/AIDS?

 

[Deetee]

Homoeopathy may be very usefull in weaning off people from unneccessary and dangerous drugs that cause iatrogenic diseases and iatrogenic neuroses.

If someone is uneccessarily on a drug or suffering side effects from it, there is no need to resort to nonsensical strategies like substituting a homeopathic remedy for them - the simple answer is to stop the drug. The vast majority of people do not need to be patronised in the way you suggest.

Yet again, you make statements without any evidence;- or can you show us some studies where homeopathy has shown its value in this regard?